12 Great Examples that define the Contemporary Age of Art
Contemporary art encompasses numerous different styles, genres and artistic approaches, and so is difficult to fully comprehend.
The plethora of artistic styles of today’s art has not yet been digested by critics, curators and art historians given that is hard to define a categorization to such a wide range of artistic means and expression from Post-Impressionism, to Dada, to Pop Art, to Installation Art and recently to NFTs.
An important element of contemporary art, that really differentiates it from modern art, is the relevance given to the viewer’s experience.
Contemporary art is more about experimentation, pushing boundaries and asking questions. Instead of artistic perfection, beauty and form contemporary artists were often more interested in the concept behind the artwork, so art now took on lots of different forms—video, photography, performance, installation—and often outside of galleries or traditional art spaces altogether.
Here are some of the most influential contemporary art examples:
Jackson Pollock, b. 1912-1956
Paul Jackson Pollock was an American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He first began painting, representational objects such as people and animals. However, he is famous for helping to create a whole new art movement called Abstract Expressionism, a movement away from the content of the picture, and towards a focus on the process of making the artwork itself.
This artwork was created at the peak of the artist’s career and it is a perfect example of the drip-painting technique which is specific to Pollock, and made him famous due to its originality. His style marks the turning point from modern art to contemporary.
Andy Warhol, b. 1928 - 1987
Andy Warhol was an American a successful magazine and ad illustrator and film director, who became a leading visual artist of the 1960s Pop art movements.
Warhol went on to make artworks depicting Campbell’s packaging throughout his career, exploring their simple graphic designs as symbols of ordinary American life.
From the late 1940s until his death in 1987, Andy Warhol produced over 9,000 paintings and sculptures and nearly 12,000 drawings.
A famously macabre painting by Andy Warhol sold for $105.4 million in 2013, a record then for the famed pop artist, according to Sotheby’s auction house.
Today Warhol remains an auction powerhouse and at a Christie’s auction on May 9, 1922 a 1964 portrait of Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol sold for $195 million breaking the record for a 20th century work held by Spanish painter Pablo Picasso’s, Les Femmes D’Alger.
Andy’s Warhol “Marilyn Diptych” (1962) is one of the most famous contemporary artwork.
Keith Haring, b.1958 - 1990
Keith Allen Haring was a popular artist and activist who was part of the legendary New York City graffiti subculture and pop art scene of the 1980s. His animated imagery has “become a widely recognized visual language”. He bridged the gap between the art world and the street, painting with graffiti NY city subways and sidewalks before committing to a studio practice. His work spread important social and political messages. Haring used his platform as an artist to raise awareness of AIDS. He himself was diagnosed with the disease in 1988.
His dynamic, joyful dancing figures can also be considered a reflection of the artist’s lifestyle and mindset of hip hop, breakdancing and graffiti which was emerging in New York City around the same time his art rose to prominence.
Keith Haring rose to prominence in 1980s New York within the East Village art scene alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf, and Jenny Holzer.
Haring met Andy Warhol in 1982 and their friendship would prove instrumental in Haring’s eventual success.
Haring’s hip hop dancing figures evoke fun, energy and joy.
Andrea Gorsky b. 1955 - Germany
Andrea Gorsky is a German photographer and professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany, known for his imposing digitally manipulated large-scale photographs of architecture and landscape, often using a high point of view.
His use of digital manipulations prompted a lively public discussion about whether photography had now become equal to painting as an art form – a debate that had gone on in many ways since the 1850s.
Andreas Gursky’s Rhein II fetched $4,338,500 at a Christie’s auction in November 2011, breaking the record for the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction.
Damien Hirst b. 1965 - British
Neo-conceptual art describes art practices in the 1980s and particularly 1990s to date that derive from the conceptual art movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The Young British Artists (YBAs), led by Damien Hirst, came to prominence in the 1990s and their work was described at the time as neo-conceptual, even though it relies very heavily on the art object to make its impact. The term is used in relation to them on the basis that the object is not the artwork, or is often a found object, which has not needed artistic skill in its production.
Since emerging onto the international art scene in the late 1980s, Damien Hirst has created installations, sculptures, paintings, and drawings that examine the complex relationships between art and beauty, religion and science, and life and death.
In 1991 Hirst created The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living: a fourteen-foot tiger shark preserved in a tank of formaldehyde commissioned by Charles Saatchi has become a landmark of contemporary art and remains one of the most controversial contemporary artworks in history.
Cecily Brown b. 1969 - British
Cecily Brown is known for her sumptuous and textured contemporary paintings charged with the erotic energy of her expressive colourful application. She is one of the central figures in the resurgence of painting since the turn of the century.
Shifting restlessly between abstract expressionism and figurative modes she displays the influence of a variety of contemporary painters, from Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon and Joan Mitchell, to that of the Old Masters like Rubens, Poussin and Goya.
Cecily Brown primarily uses improvisation allowing unplanned initial strokes to help dictate the later direction of the work and often she chooses to borrow imagery from art history, popular culture, or the intersection of the two; All the Nightmares Came Today (2012), for example, riffs off David Montgomery’s notorious cover photograph for the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s 1968 album Electric Ladyland.
David Hockney b. 1937 - British
David Hockney is one of the most popular and widely recognised artists of our time. A British painter, draftsman, printmaker, photographer, and stage designer whose works were characterized by a preoccupation with light and vibrant colors and a worldly realism derived from Pop art and photography. David Hockney was one one of the big artists involved in the pop art movement in the 1960s and one of the first artists to make extensive use of acrylic paints, a then relatively new artistic medium.
In 2018, he became the most expensive living artist in the world, with his 1972 canvas ‘Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)’ selling for $90.3 million at Christie’s auction house in New York. Hockney held this record until 15 May 2019 when Koons reclaimed the honour selling his Rabbit for more than $91 million at Christie’s in New York.
Jeff Koons b. 1955 - American
Jeffrey Lynn Koons is an American artist and a very controversial figure in the world of art. Former Wall Street commodities broker Jeff Koons rose to prominence in the mid-1980s as part of a generation of artists who explored the meaning of art in a media-saturated era. He became widely recognized for his sculptures depicting everyday objects, including balloon animals made from mirror-polished stainless steel and painted over surfaces with a coating of translucent paint.
His lustrous Balloon dog sculptures are now arguably the most recognizable of his contemporary artworks. Koons is widely collected in America and Europe, where some collectors acquire several pieces of his work. Eli Broad has 24 pieces, and Dakis Joannou owns some 38 works from all stages of the artist’s career.
In 15 May 2019 Jeff Koons faceless stainless steel ballon-like Rabbit sculpture was acquired for more than $91 million at Christie’s in New York, setting a record for the most expensive work by a living artist to be sold at auction.
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Mark Rothko b. 1903 - 1970
One of the preeminent artists of his generation, Mark Rothko is associated with the American Abstract Expressionist movement and closely identified with the New York school, a new collective voice in American art, emerged during the 1940s.
During a career that spanned five decades, he created a new and impassioned form of abstract painting. Rothko’s work is characterized by rigorous attention to formal elements such as color, shape, balance, depth, composition, and scale.
In 1946, Rothko created what art critics have since termed his transitional “multiform” paintings. Although Rothko never used the term multiform himself, it is nonetheless an accurate description of these paintings. These vacuous blurred blocks of various colors, devoid of landscape or the human figure, brought Rothko to a realization of his signature style of rectangular regions of color, which he continued to produce for the rest of his life.
In 2012, Rothko’s Orange, Red, Yellow, painting sold at Christie’s auction from the estate of David Pincus for $86,882,500 a record nominal price for post-war contemporary art at public auction.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, b. 1960-1988
Jean-Michel Basquiat is an American artist who rose to success during the 1980s as part of the Neo-expressionism movement when Andy Warhol helped him navigate the 1980s New York art world. The self-taught street art painter known for his primitive style of painting with graffiti-like images, scrawled text and an ever-growing vocabulary of symbols changed the face of contemporary art.
Focused on dichotomies such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience the artist embraced graffiti before committing to a studio practice.
Toward the end of Basquiat’s short life, his works were selling around $25,000 Basquiat’s most iconic works today are big and busy. Dustheads (1982), one of Basquiat’s most ambitious pieces, is a seven-foot-tall canvas featuring two vibrantly colored, chaotic figures against a black background.
In 2017, Basquiat Untitled, head painting from 1982, sold for $110.5 million at Sotheby’s, setting a record for an American artist and for any artwork created after 1980.
Jenny Saville, b. 1970 - British
Jenny Saville is a contemporary British painter associated with the Young British Artists, widely known for her large-scale oil painted depictions of nude women, large, drooping breasts; pregnant bellies and flab; faces smashed against plexiglass, a figure sitting on the toilet. Since her debut in 1992, Saville’s focus has remained on the female body, slightly deviating into subjects with large scale paintings of transgender people.
Her published sketches and documents include surgical photographs of liposuction, trauma victims, deformity correction, disease states and transgender patients. Though forward-looking, her work reveals a deep awareness, both intellectual and sensory, of how the body has been represented over time and across cultures—from antique and Hindu sculpture, to Renaissance drawing and painting, to the work of modern artists such as Henri Matisse, Willem de Kooning, and Pablo Picasso.
In 2018, Saville’s painting PROPPED sold at Sotheby’s London auction for the artist record price of $12,497,949.